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Quite nice actually.Why did i not see any of your entries in the yearly Photographer competition

1) Flying birds.Great colour. You captured the atmosphere very wellMakes it very pleasant to watch. Birds in flight are sharps and fill the frameOnly minor is that its best to crop the bit of wing in the left out of the image.My eye wants to see the group taking of and wanders to the bit of bird in the left which for me is a distraction

2)Ellie closeGreat composition. My eye follows the trunk and ends at the eye which is the eyecatcher of this image. A rule is that we look from left to right (as we learn to read)Therefore the placement of the eye to the right is perfect. Another pleasent image to watch

Scipio: one of the basic rules in portraiture and wildlife photography, from what I've read, is that one must make sure the subject's eye is in focus. From what I can see, the elephant's eye in your photo is not in focus.

If you are having focusing problems on your camera, there are several ways to remedy this, depending on your camera type. This includes (for the DSLR), focus lock, changing your focus point etc.

In your bird shot, some of the birds are not in focus. In my opinion this detracts from the image. The background is far enough away so that even if you increased your depth of focus to have all the birds in focus, the background would have been nicely blurred. (If you want more tips on how to increase depth of focus, lets start a new post somewhere.) Having said that, you may have been constrained by your shutter speed for this shot, wanting to capture the in-flight action.

Ok, I've just done some more personal research on the subject.The term I should have used is 'depth of field'.I didn't know there was a difference between the two.This probably deserves a post in the 'how to use your camera' thread.

Basically:Depth of focus is how much one can move the camera while retaining focus.Depth of field is the range of objects that appear to be in focus.

Still not right Josh. A lot of people confuse them, here is the difference...

Depth of focus vs depth of field

While the phrase depth of focus was historically used, and is sometimes still used, to mean depth of field, in modern times it is more often reserved for the image-side depth. Depth of field is a measurement of depth of acceptable sharpness in the object space, or subject space.

Depth of focus, however, is a measurement of how much the film or sensor plane can be displaced while an object remains in acceptably sharp focus. In this sense, it relates to a single plane in object space.[1][2] It can also be viewed as the flip side of depth of field, occurring on the opposite side of the lens.[2] With the first interpretation, the depth of focus is symmetrical about the image plane; with the latter, the depth of focus is greater on the far side of the image plane, though in most cases the distances are approximately equal.

Where depth of field often can be measured in macroscopic units such as meters and feet, depth of focus is typically measured in microscopic units such as fractions of a millimeter or thousandths of an inch.

The same factors that determine depth of field also determine depth of focus, but these factors can have different effects than they have in depth of field. Both depth of field and depth of focus increase with smaller apertures. For distant subjects (beyond macro range), depth of focus is relatively insensitive to focal length and subject distance, for a fixed f-number. In the macro region, depth of focus increases with longer focal length or closer subject distance, while depth of field decreases.

I messed about a little....Lets first show what I made of it, then the why:

Cropped more to the rule of thirds, so the photo 'reads' from left to right.The parts under water suffer from bleaching due to the reflection of the clouds. So I upped the saturation of those bits.

Just a crop... It mostly takes out the unwanted and distracting foreground. I left all the space available on the right and top as the that's the direction the bird is flying in. It wants that space, and creates a story. What does it see? Where is it going?